From Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner - during his life, the best-selling American author of all time - comes a lost classic of detective fiction featuring private eyes Donald Lam (once played by Frank Sinatra!) and Bertha Cool. SHE PLAYED THE ODDS – AND LOST! When the beautiful girlfriend of a notorious gangster vanishes, the last man to be seen with her needs an alibi – and fast. Enter Donald Lam of the Cool & Lam detective agency. Donald tracks down the two women with whom his client claims to have spent the night and the client declares the case closed. But it’s not. Something about his client’s story doesn’t add up, and Donald can’t resist the temptation to keep digging. Before he knows it, he’s dug up connections to a mining scam, an illegal casino, and a double homicide – plus an opportunity for an enterprising private eye to make a small fortune, if he can just stay alive long enough to cash in on it!

Visit Nickelodeon's SpongeBob SquarePants and all his colorful pals from Bikini Bottom in this deluxe activity book that's bursting with undersea silliness—and features 6 chunky crayons!

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Featured on recommended reading lists by the New York Times • New York Post • Library Journal • Thrillist • Locus • USA TODAY "The first great science fiction novel of 2020. " —NPR “As intellectually playful as the best of Thomas Pynchon and as sardonically warm as the best of Kurt Vonnegut. . . A masterful and humane gem of a novel.” —Shaun Hamill, author of A Cosmology of Monsters Blending the piercing humor of Alexandra Kleeman and the jagged satire of Black Mirror, an audacious, eerily prescient debut novel that chronicles the rise and fall of a massive high-rise housing complex, and the lives it affected before - and after - its demise. Standing nearly five hundred stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap. In exchange for digging gear, a rehabilitated bicycle, and a small living stipend, a vast community of Dig Hands removes debris, trash, and bodies from the building’s mountainous remains, which span twenty acres of unincorporated desert land. Orville Anders burrows into the bowels of the Heap to find his brother Bernard, the beloved radio DJ of Los Verticalés, who is alive and miraculously broadcasting somewhere under the massive rubble. For months, Orville has lived in a sea of campers that surrounds the Heap, working tirelessly to free Bernard—the only known survivor of the imploded city—whom he speaks to every evening, calling into his radio show. The brothers’ conversations are a ratings bonanza, and the station’s parent company, Sundial Media, wants to boost its profits by having Orville slyly drop brand names into his nightly talks with Bernard. When Orville refuses, his access to Bernard is suddenly cut off, but strangely, he continues to hear his own voice over the airwaves, casually shilling products as “he” converses with Bernard. What follows is an imaginative and darkly hilarious story of conspiracy, revenge, and the strange life and death of Los Verticalés that both captures the wonderful weirdness of community and the bonds that tie us together.

Covering over 10,000 idioms and collocations characterized by similarity in their wording or metaphorical idea which do not show corresponding similarity in their meanings, this dictionary presents a unique cross-section of the English language. Though it is designed specifically to assist readers in avoiding the use of inappropriate or erroneous phrases, the book can also be used as a regular phraseological dictionary providing definitions to individual idioms, cliches, and set expressions. Most phrases included in the dictionary are in active current use, making information about their meanings and usage essential to language learners at all levels of proficiency.

Advanced Algorithms and Data Structures introduces a collection of algorithms for complex programming challenges in data analysis, machine learning, and graph computing. Summary As a software engineer, you’ll encounter countless programming challenges that initially seem confusing, difficult, or even impossible. Don’t despair! Many of these “new” problems already have well-established solutions. Advanced Algorithms and Data Structures teaches you powerful approaches to a wide range of tricky coding challenges that you can adapt and apply to your own applications. Providing a balanced blend of classic, advanced, and new algorithms, this practical guide upgrades your programming toolbox with new perspectives and hands-on techniques. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the technology Can you improve the speed and efficiency of your applications without investing in new hardware? Well, yes, you can: Innovations in algorithms and data structures have led to huge advances in application performance. Pick up this book to discover a collection of advanced algorithms that will make you a more effective developer. About the book Advanced Algorithms and Data Structures introduces a collection of algorithms for complex programming challenges in data analysis, machine learning, and graph computing. You’ll discover cutting-edge approaches to a variety of tricky scenarios. You’ll even learn to design your own data structures for projects that require a custom solution. What's inside Build on basic data structures you already know Profile your algorithms to speed up application Store and query strings efficiently Distribute clustering algorithms with MapReduce Solve logistics problems using graphs and optimization algorithms About the reader For intermediate programmers. About the author Marcello La Rocca is a research scientist and a full-stack engineer. His focus is on optimization algorithms, genetic algorithms, machine learning, and quantum computing. Table of Contents 1 Introducing data structures PART 1 IMPROVING OVER BASIC DATA STRUCTURES 2 Improving priority queues: d-way heaps 3 Treaps: Using randomization to balance binary search trees 4 Bloom filters: Reducing the memory for tracking content 5 Disjoint sets: Sub-linear time processing 6 Trie, radix trie: Efficient string search 7 Use case: LRU cache PART 2 MULTIDEMENSIONAL QUERIES 8 Nearest neighbors search 9 K-d trees: Multidimensional data indexing 10 Similarity Search Trees: Approximate nearest neighbors search for image retrieval 11 Applications of nearest neighbor search 12 Clustering 13 Parallel clustering: MapReduce and canopy clustering PART 3 PLANAR GRAPHS AND MINIMUM CROSSING NUMBER 14 An introduction to graphs: Finding paths of minimum distance 15 Graph embeddings and planarity: Drawing graphs with minimal edge intersections 16 Gradient descent: Optimization problems (not just) on graphs 17 Simulated annealing: Optimization beyond local minima 18 Genetic algorithms: Biologically inspired, fast-converging optimization

In 1970, a jury convicted Robert Hillary King of a crime he did not commit and sentenced him to 35 years in prison. He became a member of the Black Panther Party while in Angola State Penitentiary, successfully organizing prisoners to improve conditions. In return, prison authorities beat him, starved him, and gave him life without parole after framing him for a second crime. He was thrown into solitary confinement, where he remained in a six-by-nine-foot cell for 29 years as one of the Angola 3. In 2001, the state grudgingly acknowledged his innocence and set him free. This is his story. It begins at the beginning: born black, born poor, born in Louisiana in 1942, King journeyed to Chicago as a hobo at the age of 15. He married and had a child, and briefly pursued a semi-pro boxing career to help provide for his family. Just a teenager when he entered the Louisiana penal system for the first time, King tells of his attempts to break out of this system, and his persistent pursuit of justice where there is none. Yet this remains a story of inspiration and courage, and the triumph of the human spirit. The conditions in Angola almost defy description, yet King never gave up his humanity, or the work towards justice for all prisoners that he continues to do today. From the Bottom of the Heap, so simply and humbly told, strips bare the economic and social injustices inherent in our society, while continuing to be a powerful literary testimony to our own strength and capacity to overcome. The paperback edition includes additional writings from Robert King and an update on the case of the Angola 3.

Go is an increasingly popular language for programming everything from web applications to distributed network services. This practical guide provides recipes to help you unravel common problems and perform useful tasks when working with Go. Each recipe includes self-contained code solutions that you can freely use, along with a discussion of how and why they work. Programmers new to Go can quickly ramp up their knowledge while accomplishing useful tasks, and experienced Go developers can save time by cutting and pasting proven code directly into their applications. Recipes include: Creating a module Calling code from another module Returning and handling an error Converting strings to numbers (or converting numbers to strings) Modifying multiple characters in a string Creating substrings from a string Capturing string input And so much more